CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Seven

The two week heatwave was mercifully breaking. Nine days after Judge Joe Crater had stepped into a cab on West 45th Street,  a cool rain was sweeping the trash down the gutters of Italian Harlem along 2nd Avenue.  It was Friday, 15 August 1930, two weeks before the judge's disappearance would be reported, and two men, their hats pulled low and their collars pulled high, shuffled up the back stairs of a Speakeasy  and slipped past the shadow holding the door open for them.

The larger man,  Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia (above), was carrying a nondescript brown leather bag,  instantly recognizable to 150,000 Italian immigrants crammed into the slums between 96th and 125th streets, Lexington Avenue to the west and the East River. 

His shorter companion, Frank "Don Ciccio" Scalise (above), kept his hands in his coat pockets, as if to warm them. In truth each gloved hand cradled a loaded revolver.  Inside they followed the stream of puddles across the floor of the "Speak", past the board hoodlums playing cards.

It seemed they had come like so many others  to genuflect before the Peter "The Old Fox" Morello, (above)  waiting in the small room ahead, sitting behind his counting table, counting that week's numbers take.  

The Fox, aka Giuseppe Morello (above in 1900), AKA "The Claw", was born with only one finger on his right hand. He had survived the heartless world of the Sicilian Mafia for 64 years by thinking faster than his physically fit enemies.  But age and greed had made him fat and slowed his thinking.  And as the pair approached the table, Morello's eyes were fixed on the bag swinging in Anastasia's left hand. Did it look heavy? Did it look full?  He failed to notice that the Sicilian, Scalise,  had paused to turn the lock, as he closed  the door behind them.  The signal was when the Italian Anastasia dropped the bag on the table. Morello's fixation allowed Scalise to free both his hands from his pockets and begin shooting into the Mustache Pete's chest from just an arm's length. The last thought Peter Morello had was that they had not opened the bag.

Anastasia killed the guard, and then joined Scalise in pumping more lead into the old man's chest. There must be, there would be could be no doubt the best brain in the Masseria mob was dead. Anastasia paused to sweep the blood spattered money into the bag. Richer by thirty grand,  the pair walked swiftly out the Speakeasy's front door while the guards were still breaking down the back door to reach Morello.  

It was all part of a "Mob War" engineered by Lucky Luciano.  With Morello eliminated, Luciano's boss, Joe "The Boss" Masseria was isolated. 

He would die in another hail of bullets in the summer of 1931, while sitting in a Coney Island restaurant (above), thumbing through a deck of cards. Within a year Lucky Luciano would remake American organized crime in a corporate image. 

One week after Morello's assassination  on Friday, 22 August, 1930, Jack "Legs" Diamond climbed the gangplank of the 27,000 ton Red Star liner Belgenland (above). With him came his loving wife Alice, and his red-haired girlfriend Marion "Kiki Roberts" Stasmick. 

Jack  (above) told the inquisitive reporters that he was going to sample the waters in Vichy, France. But, if the truth be told, what made the slick waters of Vichy so attractive was that Jack  Diamond was under indictment for the murder of an upstate trucker. And when news of Judge Crater's disappearance finally broke at the end of August, Jack meant to be out of sight, and out of mind. 

However, one month later, Jack would be back in America, after being deported by first the French and then the German governments. As he stepped off the boat in Philadelphia, he was arrested again, and then ordered to leave town. He arrived back in New York City, only to be gunned down in his hotel room, on Sunday,  12 October, 1930.  Shot five times, Jack  now "The Clay Pigeon" Diamond (above with Alice) again survived, and was released from the hospital on 30 December,  

On 18 December, 1931, Jack's enemies came back, catching him asleep in his girl friend Kiki Robert's bed.  She was not with him at the time. But this time the assassins were taking no chances that Jack would leg out an escape. The pistol barrel was pressed so hard behind Jack's  left ear that it scorched his scalp as the three bullets plowed into his brain.

 After the New York County Grand Jury had disbanded, Stella Crater (above) returned to her 40 Fifth Avenue, apartment on Sunday, 18 January 1931.  Three days later, while going through a dresser drawer, she "discovered" 4 manila envelopes containing $6,619 in cash - over $100,000 today - Joe Crater's will,  two life insurance policies, and a 3 page note listing 20 companies and individuals who owed Joe money.  And at the bottom of that list, supposedly in Joe's handwriting, were the words, "Am very weary. Love, Joe." Stella decided to call the cops.

It was a smart move. It meant the money was not "hers" but "theirs", the taxes divided as joint property. But the cops were confused. They had searched that dresser several times, almost taken it apart. As of Halloween 1930,  there had been no envelopes in that drawer. To the cops it looked like a care package from a lawyer - perhaps from William Klein -  and they thought it was meant to buy off Stella, to keep her mouth shut.   If it was, it worked. 

Now she did not have to give up the house in Belgrade  Lakes, Maine. And as quickly as she could, Stella Crater returned there, and returned to her $12 a week job as a telephone operator.  

Over the next year the city and state of New York spent $4 million, looking for Stella's husband, Judge Joe Crater, They looked in Maine, in Canada, in Mexico, in Cuba and California. Good Time Joe was seen on the Atlantic City Boardwalk, in a Virginia Sanatorium,  shaved by a barber in North Dakota, gambling in a bar in South America and drinking cocktails at a European spa. 

But the tone in the coverage changed when one detailed tip claimed that Joe was holed up in a Montreal hotel room. The Mounties burst through the door to discover a couple enjoying their honeymoon.  That popped the bubble, and the snickering public began to laugh out loud.  Prohibition had made corruption so common the practiced ineptitude of the police and courts had become a joke. A year after Joe's disappearance, despite the headline, Judge Crater was never found.

In September of 1933,  First National Studios in Los Angeles, released a 76 minute long film titled, "Bureau of Missing Persons", staring Pat O'Brian and Glenda Farrell, with Bette Davis in a minor role.  

It was a police procedural into the techniques used to locate missing people like Joe Crater, and offered to pay Joe Crater $10,000 if he turned himself in at the Strand Theater box office during the picture' New York City run.  Needless to say, he did not.

In June of 1936, 79 year old "Lucky Blacky" Blackiet (above) walked into the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department and declared that he had "swapped yarns" with the Missing-est man in America, while out prospecting near his homestead at Santa Ysabel, four miles from Warner Hot Springs.  The colorful "Lucky" said Joe Crater told him, "In one more year, I will be legally dead. I hope I can stick it out for that long."

Why the police believe "Lucky Blacky" is unclear, but it seems at least one San Diego Sheriff's Deputy thought the old prospector resembled the Crown Prince Archduke Johann Orth Salvator of Tuscany, who had gone missing off Cape Horn in 1911.  As proof of his campfire meeting with the judge ,  "Lucky" introduced 2 asses he claimed had belonged to Joe Crater.  County Commissioner R.A. Radifer,  two Los Angeles police officers and a couple of reporters went trudging off into the scrub bush mountains, following Lucky.   But after a week spent in the pounding August heat, swallowing dust and sleeping with scorpions  the expedition returned to civilization, firmly convinced they had been "had" by the old prospector.  Reduced to a laughing stock, they then suffered the gall of having "Lucky" present them with a voucher for $10 a day for his services as a "guide".  Needless to say, "Lucky" never got paid. 

In July of 1937, Stella won her petition to have Joe declared legally dead. She could now collect the $20, 000 in life insurance - over a quarter of million dollars today.  Stella moved to Elkton,  Maryland, and married a wealthy electrical engineer named Carl Kunz (above). They took their honeymoon cruise on the French cruiser “Normandie”.  With his money she could hire a lawyer to prove  Joe had died violently, which would qualify for a double indemnity payout. 

Stella hired attorney Emil K. Ellis, who spent years tracking down the loose ends left by the Grand Jury.   One of the women subpoenaed was a chorus girl named June Brice, who had supposedly met with Joe in her midtown apartment after he left West 45th Street on the night of 6 August, 1930. But June had vanished and never told her story under oath. Ellis eventually found a friend of June's, who told him, "Miss Brice said she was carrying a secret concerning the disappearance of Justice Crater. She said her life had been threatened."  

It was enough to keep Ellis digging until September of 1940, when he found June had been admitted to the Pilgrim State Hospital (above), in Brentwood, Long Island, New York, under the name of Jean Covel. 

Reporter Fred Menagh recorded the dramatic scene when a court order finally gave Ellis access to the mystery woman. "Four ghost-like figures," wrote Menagh, "shrouded from head to foot in spotless white surgical masks, caps, and gowns, gathered at the bedside of the hollow- cheeked girl with the glassy, staring eyes...Ellis, brief case clutched in one rubber gloved hand, stepped forward...His voice was slightly muffled by the gauze mask covering the lower half of his face, "Do you know what happened to Justice Joseph Force Crater?" 

"The girl on the cot shrank back. She dug at thin, bloodless lips with claw like dreadful hands, so emaciated they seemed almost transparent against the light that streamed in through the barred and grated windows of her room. "We must not," she whispered hoarsely, "remember the things that make us mad." Ellis produced a packet of letters, clippings and photographs from his brief case. The girl's staring eyes darted from side to side in their deep sunk sockets. "Don't write letters," she admonished in her rasping voice, "They don't explain anything." 

"...the once beautiful showgirl, her once blond hair turned totally white, her gorgeous complexion now the color and texture of parchment, could remember only disjointed fragments of her past...June's most normal response occurred when Ellis...showed her a picture of herself as she looked when she was a Broadway butterfly. "I was pretty, wasn't I?" remarked the former showgirl, pathetically, a wisp of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth...Ellis, for more than an hour...vainly probed the fear-shattered mind o£ a once beautiful Broadway showgirl...At last he threw up his hands in despair. "It is no use," he said simply."  In 1942, June Brice died, her mind still confused.

During the 1930's, New York City Police Officer Charles Burn picked up a second job - as a bodyguard for one of the Brownsville Boys most prolific traveling assassins,  "Abe Kid Twist" Reles.  By 1939, Kid Twist had escaped 6 homicide charges. But while he was jailed for beating a African-American parking lot attendant, he realized the cops finally had the goods on him. Facing execution he decided to turn State's Evidence and admitted to committing 11 murders and provided information allowing for the closing of 85 more murder cases.  And suddenly, the secret operations of Murder Incorporated were public knowledge . Abe would prove to be an excellent witness, with an amazing memory for detail, and a believable testimony.

One by one, The Brownsville Boys were convicted  and later executed - Lepke Buchalter, Louis Capone, Mendy Weiss, Harry Strauss, Frank Abbandando, Irving "The Plug" Nitzberg.  Abe even helped convict his childhood friend "Bugsy" Goldstein for murder. But on Wednesday, 13 November, 1940, he was to testify at the most important trial yet, that of Albert Anastasia, AKA "The Lord High Executioner", for the murder of a Longshoreman.  But unlike all the others, Albert was a "Made Man", a member of the Mafia with a seat at Lucky Luciano's unifying council

About ten minutes after seven that Wednesday morning,  NY Detective Victor Robins entered Room 623 of the 14 story Half Moon Hotel, at West 29th Street and the Coney Island Boardwalk. He expected to wake Abraham Reles, to prepare him for his first day of testimony at the Anastasia trail. But the bed was empty.  

After a minutes long search of the suite of rooms,  Robins noticed a string of bed sheets tied to a radiator, and draping out the window (above). Looking down he saw a clump of clothing on the roof of the kitchen extension, four stories below. 

Upon closer inspection, they found the body of Abe Reles, the man who may have shoved an ice pick into Judge Joe Crater's brain.

 The newspapers named the dead killer, "The Canary who Could Sing but Could Not Fly".  Albert Anastasia was immediately released. Five of the officers guarding Reles were immediately demoted. But one of those cops was Charles Burns. Did he take the $100,000 being offered to kill Abe Reles? Or did Kid Twist mistake his bronchitis as cancer, and commit suicide? Or was he trying to reach some hoard of cash he had hidden? However, in 1951, a grand jury concluded it was an accidental death during an attempted escape, and maybe that was the truth. But I do not think so.

And still stories about the missing Judge Joseph Force Crater kept floating across the public view. During the 1950's, a reporter in a San Antonio, Texas police station gave a cigarette to an filthy, raggedly dressed old man being processed for release. The reporter noticed the man's manicured fingernails.When asked about his background the man became taciturn. Later, the reporter found a note left in the bathroom, scribbled on a paper towel  and addressed to him.  It read, " “Thanks for the cigarette. You almost got a scoop. Remember that judge in New York?"  

Stella never got the Double Indemnity payments, but she did squeeze a settlement out of the insurance companies.  After her 1950 separation from  Carl Kunz - the couple never divorced - , Stella  made a modest living in New York City, off her husband's notoriety.  

In 1961 Stella finally co-wrote a book about about the man she now realized she had never really known. She called it “The Empty Robe : The Story of the Disappearance of Judge Crater,"  In it Stella painted a fond image of the vanished jurist. And every 6 April after that,  she stopped in a Greenwich Village bar. She sat at a table and ordered two drinks. After finishing the first, she would then raise the second class, saying, "Good luck, Joe, wherever you are." She would then swallow the second and quietly leave.

Still married, Stella Crater Kunz died in 1969,  at 70 years of age.

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CALLING JUDGE CRATER Chapter Six

So what happened after Judge Joseph Force Crater left William Klein and Sally Lou Ritzi, at Billy Haas' Chop House on West 45th Street? Did he get into a cab, or did he walk? Police never found a record of  any taxi carrying Judge Crater that night.  And no drivers ever came forward to admit transporting the "Missingest Man in America" on the night he went missing.  Of course the questions weren't asked until a month later. It is likely the driver would have simply forgotten the fare, or given the level of corruption in city government, decided their life would be simpler if they kept their mouth shut. Assuming the cab ride was uneventful.

Joe had reserved a seat for "The Dancing Partner", but if he did not call for the ticket by curtain time, it most likely would have been sold at a discount at the ticket window.  Newspapers at the time said the seat was occupied,  but given that no one asked until a month later, there is no reason the house staff would have remembered who actually sat in that seat. Besides, it seems more likely to me the real significance of the events at the Chop House is that Joe's departure was delayed until he had missed the curtain time.

But it also seems logical that a cab idling at the curb on West 45th street, waiting for Joe to make his appearance, and turning away passengers who were not Joe,  would have drawn attention. But the peak demand for taxis would have been thirty minutes earlier. By 9:15pm, many of the taxi's in the Times Square Theater district would have been doing pretty much what the cabs in the photo above are doing - parked in the circled in the center of the square. The drivers were relaxing, taking a break and talking to fellow drivers, or bringing paperwork up to date.  Or waiting for their target, Judge Joe Crater, to emerge from the Chophouse, looking to catch or be caught by a cab.

So now the focus must be on what happened inside the Chop House. What were William Klein, Sally Ritz and Joe Crater talking about? They might have been talking about their shared interest in Broadway theater. They might have been discussing the bad reviews for The Dancing Partner. But I suspect, William Klein brought up the topic of the court cases Joe had spent two mornings going over at the Central Street Court House. And if so the name of Jack Diamond (above) must have come up. 

The hot headed Jack Diamond  (above) was being squeezed out of Manhattan.  His speakeasy in Times Square, the Hotsy - Totsy Club, had been closed for a year, after Jack gunned down three men there.  He had already started moving in on liquor distributors in upstate New York, around Albany.  Jack was kidnapping drivers and trucking company owners, beating them up, sometimes savagely, in order to gain information. Who was dispatching trucks, who paid the drivers?  Within a year he would be on trial upstate for just such an assault.  But finding out who to to beat up, who to threaten, hiring the thugs and muscle to participate in the beatings, that all took money.  And the only place Jack "Legs" Diamond could now get money, was by first looting and then selling off the legitimate businesses Jack had used to launder his Manhattan profits from bootlegging, drugs, gambling and prostitution.

Selling gutted companies to unsuspecting civilians always produces lawsuits. The buyers have been cheated, and they are obligated by their stockholders and/or partners to challenge the fraud in court, to seek reimbursement.   And that is the real reason mobsters buy judges. They don't buy criminal court judges, They buy civil court judges, judges like Judge Joseph Force Crater.  The story that would later be told, the story I believe, is that Judge Crater had a case before him involving just such a Jack Diamond looted company.  And Jack wanted the case thrown out. And, so goes this story, Judge Crater thought there were too many reformers sniffing around the Center Street Court House to do that again.  

And, so goes this story, Joe had gone to the Chop House to meet William Klein, to deliver the message that there was no deal. Klein had the morality of a successful lawyer, and had no compunction about acting as a go-between between Jack Diamond and Joe Crater.  Joe would have felt safe dealing with Klein, keeping his distance from the well publicized and dangerous "Legs" Diamond. As compensation for the busted deal, Joe handed Klein the $5,100. And he warned Klein he had an insurance policy, the documents in the six file folders, detailing decisions by other judges, in other cases, decided in Diamond's favor.  But what was the lovely, leggy dancer, Sally Ritz (above), doing there?  I believe her job was tell the cab driver waiting toward 8th Avenue  that the deal with Crater was a "go" or a "no go". By walking out with Klein and Crater, she told the cab driver the deal was off.

I am not suggesting that Sally Ritz (above)  knew she was setting Joe up to be murdered.  Telling her  in advance would have been too risky.  She might have backed out. I think she was told Jack Diamond just wanted to 'rough up' Judge Crater. But I reject the idea that Diamond had that in mind, and I'll get to why in a moment. But  my explanation for events in the ChopHouse explain the changing stories from both Klein and Ritz. I believe that what was talked about in the Chop House was something other than Broadway gossip. And I believe that Sally was more than window dressing. 

Why am I so certain that this version is accurate? Because of a letter discovered in 2005, by 46 year old Barbara O'Brian , while she was going through the personal property of her great grandmother, Stella Ferrucci-Good, who had died in April of that year at the age of 91.  Inside a metal box Barbara found a yellowed envelope marked, "Not to be opened until after my death".  Well, Stella was now dead, so Barbra opened the envelope and read the letter.  As to the veracity of the story it told, Mrs. O'Brian said, "My grandmother never lied. She was a very serious person. She must have believed it if she wrote it down.”  It may not have been true, but Stella believed it.  In 1930, on the night Joe Crater disappeared, Stella Ferrucci was married to Mr. Robert Good. He worked for the Parks Department, and supplemented his salary on weekends as a lifeguard on Coney Island beach.

On his deathbed in 1975, Stella wrote, Robert had confessed a secret. In the mid-1950's, after Robert had risen to a supervisor in the City of New York Parks Department, he had became good friends with twin brothers, Charles and Frank Burns. They were then police detectives, but in 1930, 32 year old Frank was a taxi driver.  And during a social evening with significant alcohol consumption,  Charles and Frank began joking about the New York City Aquarium (above) then under construction at the end of West 8th Street, in Brooklyn  where it met the Coney Island Boardwalk.  Robert was perplexed by the exchange, so the tipsy brothers filled in the details. 

According to this story, 32 year old Frank Burns was the cab driver who picked up Judge Joseph Force Crater on West 45th Street that night.  Frank drove toward Ninth Avenue, where he slowed down so that two more men could jump into the cab. One of them was Frank's brother, Charles Burns, who was a New York City Cop, supposed to be on duty that night at the 60th Precinct, on West Sixth Street, in Brooklyn. The second man was a short 24 year old Jewish mobster and sociopath from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, named Abraham "Kid Twist" Reles.  

Abe Reles (above) was a member of what would later be labeled "Murder Incorporated", but knowin within the mobs as The Brownsville Boys. They were twenty or so mostly Jewish mobsters, kept on retainer by "Mob Accountant" Meyer Lansky, and under the direct control of Albert "The Mad Hatter" Anastasia AKA "The Lord High Executioner". 

Lansky offered the services of the Brownsville Boys at $1,000 to $5,000 per "hit" to mostly Italian and Sicilian mobsters, nationwide.  Not being Italian or Sicilian  they could scout the intended victim without setting off alarms. The second team would be in the area only long enough to murder the victim, and immediately leave again.  And if they were witnessed in the act, no locals knew their faces or their names. It is estimated that The Boys murdered at least 30,000 mobsters and witnesses between 1925 and 1940.

"Kid Twist's" preferred weapon was an simple ice pick.  It was silent, easy to carry, and quick. He got so skilled at delivering the death blow via the ear, that some of the victims he confessed to killer were diagnosed as suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.  While Charles Burns shoved Crater to the floor of the cab, pinning him down, Reles scrambled onto the seat and shoved the thin steel pick directly into the judge's ear, and drove it deep with the heel of his hand.  In an instant,  before he had time to do much more than grunt, Good Time Judge Joseph Force Crater "disappeared efficiently, completely, and forever.”  The Burns brothers told Robert Good they had intended to "rough up" the judge, and claimed he was killed because he resisted. But if that had been true, there would have been no reason to contract with Abe Reles. 

During and after the murder,  said the Ferrucci-Good letter,  Frank Burns drove the cab to the end of  West Eighth Street in Coney Island, Brooklyn. Waiting for them were 2 more members of Murder Inc, Martin "Buggsy" Goldstein and Harry "Pittsburgh Phil" Strauss. They had a grave waiting, and while Frank stood guard, the other three buried the judge  "under the boardwalk." 

Except it could not have been there. The boardwalk had been built between 1922 and 1924, over the water and sand.  The Brownsville boys were too professional and too experienced to  have buried their victim in sand, where the body would have been uncovered by the first passing dog.  Crater's  grave must have been in soil, or better yet, under the concrete foundation of a building or a wall. In 1939, a section of the boardwalk between West Eighth and West 15th streets burned in the Steeplechase Park fire, and was rebuilt 280 feet further inland, to provide more access to the ocean for bathers, who had not a been accommodated until 1924. That rebuilding should have exposed any burial under the boardwalk near West 8th Street.  It did not. 

Emil Ellis, who was the lawyer who represented  Stella Crater in her lawsuits against the insurance companies, tells a slightly different story.  He agrees that the murder happened in the cab, but claims the judge's body was transported to New Jersey, where it was devoured in the furnace of a mill Jack Diamond had an interest in.  When Joe was finally declared legally dead in 1937, Stella collected on Joe's 2 life insurance policies.  But after that Emil Ellis sued the insurance companies for Stella, insisting the companies pay the double indemnity clause, which provided that if Joe died as the victim of violence, the payout would be twice the amount of the policy.  Despite lawyer Ellis' determined and diligent work, that never happened.

But I think that was just part of the misdirection which helped cover up the murder of Judge Joe Crater.

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